Gmail on the Web vs. Gmail in Mail

Gmail started as a web-only email system; POP and IMAP access were tacked on later. As a result of its web focus, Google designed Gmail to handle email in a fundamentally different way from conventional email servers. Although I don’t care for Gmail’s model, I understand why a lot of people prefer it—but unfortunately, it’s a way of looking at email that Mail can’t entirely replicate. Here are some of the key differences:

• Labels vs. mailboxes: On the Gmail website, you can apply descriptive labels to each message to help you find messages with particular labels later—but the web interface has no mailboxes or folders. For example, the Inbox is simply a view that shows all messages with the Inbox label; any of those messages might also have one or more additional labels that you’ve applied, such as Work and Project A. Mail, by contrast, follows the traditional model in which messages are filed rather than tagged; messages are treated more like discrete files, so a given message normally exists in only one mailbox. When you access Gmail with an IMAP client such as Mail, Gmail’s labels are translated into mailboxes. The result is that if a message has three labels on the Gmail website, it appears in three mailboxes in Mail.

  Mail stores just one copy of each message and invisibly tags it with the names of all the other mailboxes in which it should appear. That saves space and bandwidth, but unlike when using Gmail on the web, there’s no convenient way to apply multiple Gmail labels to a single message in Mail. (The inconvenient way is to hold down the Option key while dragging a message to each of several mailboxes.)

• Conversations: Gmail shows all the messages in a conversation—a related series of exchanges between you and one or more other people—together in a single “stack,” known as a thread, regardless of how you’ve labeled the individual messages. Mail can do something similar, as long as View > Organize by Conversation is checked for the currently selected mailbox, but Mail and Gmail have somewhat different ideas of what constitutes a conversation, so you may not see exactly the same set of messages in both places.

• Archiving: In Gmail, you can archive a message, which removes its Inbox label and thus removes the message from your Inbox (but doesn’t explicitly put it an another mailbox—remember, there aren’t any!). Archived messages, along with all your other messages, appear when you click the All Mail link on Gmail’s website, so the All Mail category serves as a giant storage area for all your stored (and sent) messages, even if you haven’t bothered to label them.

  Mail handles archiving for Gmail accounts the way Gmail does, and displays a special mailbox for Gmail accounts (see Special Mailboxes) called Archive (All Mail), which should show you the same collection of messages you see when you click All Mail on the Gmail website. (Mail still uses a dedicated Archive mailbox for each non-Gmail account, however.)

• Special mailbox handling: Mail in macOS automatically uses the correct Gmail mailboxes for Drafts, Sent, Junk, and Trash, without any extra setup steps. However, you’re free to choose different mailboxes to serve these purposes in Mail, and you can even opt not to store such messages on the server at all.

• Starred: Another “special” Gmail label, which appears as a mailbox when you use IMAP, is Starred. Gmail expects you to use the Starred label to indicate messages that are especially important. Mail doesn’t have stars, but it does have flags (Message > Flag > Color), which serve approximately the same purpose. So, a message that’s Starred in Gmail appears with a flag in Mail, and vice versa—although Mail’s various flag colors don’t map to Gmail’s star colors; the most you can guarantee is that having some color of flag equates to having some color of star.

• Important: Gmail has yet another label, Important, that acts as a sort of reverse spam filter—it’s a way of automatically highlighting messages that Gmail thinks are especially important, so they’ll stand out in a crowded Inbox. Important messages can appear first in your Inbox on the Gmail website, and can be identified with a special marker icon. (To determine how Gmail treats “important” messages, log in to your Gmail account, choose Settings from the gear pop-up menu at the top of the page, and click Inbox; then choose the desired option from the “Inbox type” pop-up menu.) Although Mail can display an Important mailbox under your Gmail account that contains all the messages labeled as Important, it doesn’t show the special markers or put important messages at the top of your Inbox.

• Priority Inbox: If you activate Gmail’s Priority Inbox feature, you can configure your Inbox to prioritize the display of incoming messages you consider most worthy of your immediate attention (such as Important, Unread, and/or Starred)—and to display only a limited number in each category. To turn this feature on, log in to your Gmail account, choose Settings from the gear pop-up menu at the top of the page, click Inbox, and choose Priority Inbox from the “Inbox type” pop-up menu. Choose your options for each item in the Inbox Sections area, and click Save Changes. (To turn off Priority Inbox, repeat these steps, but choose Default—or any other option—from the “Inbox type” pop-up menu.) Mail doesn’t display a Priority Inbox, so regardless of your settings here, Mail displays all messages in your Gmail Inbox, just as before.

• Categories: If you choose the default Inbox type (as opposed to Priority Inbox or some other arrangement that shows a certain type of message first), Gmail on the web displays a series of labels called Categories that show you all the messages Gmail perceives as being Social, Promotions, Updates, or Forums. These labels serve useful purposes on the Gmail website, but they don’t appear in Mail.

Gmail vs. Other IMAP Providers

Now let’s turn the situation around and look at how Mail handles Gmail as compared to other IMAP providers. If you’re used to a conventional IMAP account, you’ll notice that Gmail behaves almost the same in Mail, with one major exception (which I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this book): Archiving Gmail messages removes the Inbox label, such that they’ll appear in All Mail on the Gmail website rather than having an Archive label. With other IMAP providers, archiving a message moves it to the Archive mailbox.

Activate and Configure IMAP

Before you can set up a Gmail in Mail, make sure IMAP is enabled for the account and configured properly:

1. Log in to your Gmail account (using this link or whichever URL you normally use for a Google Apps account with a custom domain).

2. From the gear pop-up menu at the top of the page, choose Settings, and then click “Forwarding and POP/IMAP.”

3. In the IMAP Access section, make sure Enable IMAP is selected.

4. Leave all other settings unchanged. But, if you’ve previously changed any of the defaults, this is a good time to put them back:

   • Under “When I mark a message in IMAP as deleted,” make sure “Auto-Expunge on - Immediately update the server. (default)” is selected.

   • Under “Folder Size Limits,” make sure “Do not limit the number of messages in an IMAP folder (default)” is selected. Otherwise, Mail will download only a portion of your Gmail messages (the number you specify in the pop-up menu), but not necessarily the most interesting or important messages.

   If you made any changes, click Save Changes, and then go to the Labels tab:

   • Make sure the Show in IMAP checkboxes for at least Sent Mail, Drafts, All Mail, Spam, and Trash are selected. (The rest are up to you.)

You can now set up Mail to access your account.

Add Your Gmail Account

To set up your Gmail account in Mail, follow these steps:

1. Go to Mail > Preferences > Accounts and click the plus button in the lower-left corner.

2. Select Google and click Continue.

3. Enter your full Gmail address (whether that’s a gmail.com address or one with a custom domain via Google Apps) and click Next.

4. Enter your Gmail password and click Next again. (If you have two-step verification enabled, you’re prompted at this point to enter the numeric code generated by your authentication app.)

5. In the list of apps that appears, leave Mail selected. You’ll also see checkboxes for Contacts, Calendar, Messages, and Notes—although in some cases one or more of them may be dimmed. Check them to set up those additional services automatically, or uncheck them to restrict the setup to email. (Either way, you can always change these settings later in System Preferences > Internet Accounts.)

6. Click Done.

Mail sets up your account and begins downloading any mailboxes and messages already stored on Gmail’s servers.

In the “Send mail as” section click the “Add another email address” link, and follow the instructions to enter and verify another address. (In almost all cases, you’ll want to leave “Treat as an alias” checked; click the Learn More link for details.) You can repeat this with as many addresses as necessary.